Getting a clear, trustworthy read on what drives market share can feel like gazing into a crystal ball.
After all, market share growth is the metric that indicates whether your marketing efforts are successfully increasing sales and improving your industry positioning. But across industries, marketers face a longstanding struggle to link market share growth to the individual advertising initiatives that triggered it.
Without this information, marketers are left fumbling in the dark as they attempt to assess their performance and make improvements. If you don’t know what’s working, you don’t know where to invest more resources — and if you don’t know what’s not, you don’t have a roadmap for what needs to improve.
Fortunately, research from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and renowned advertising effectiveness researcher Les Binet has proved that there’s an accurate predictive signal that allows marketers to see whether their work is likely to result in future share of market growth.
The magic metric? Share of search, which measures the total number of searches for a brand as a proportion of the total number of searches for all brands in its category. Our findings show that when advertisers grow their share of search, market share growth is regularly not far behind.
And by measuring the search engagement generated by individual TV ads, marketers can obtain a fast, predictive signal that tells them if a spot is propelling their brand toward a growing piece of the industry pie.
Across industries, there’s an 83% correlation between share of search and market share
In partnership with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, we conducted our own research by reviewing 30 case studies across 12 industry categories in seven different countries.
What we found is that across these case studies, brands that grow their share of search soon grow their market share — and those that lose search share typically lose market share in the coming months. In industries such as automotive, restaurants, insurance, CPG, and more, we found an average correlation of 83% between share of search and share of market.
As an example, we can look at what happened in the property and casualty insurance industry during a five-year span from 2016 to 2021.
Here’s what the industry looked like in 2016. In this graph, we’ve plotted share of market on the Y-axis and share of search on the X-axis.
As you can see, Brand A had around 30% market share despite retaining just 20% of the industry’s share of search. Meanwhile, Brand B had just 10% of the market despite a stronger 15% share of search.
What happened next? Brand B gained market share in a way that reflected its strong share of search, while Brand lost share in correlation with its relatively weak share of search.
And that’s just one example — in our research, we saw similar correlations across a range of industries.
Ad-driven search engagement is one of the levers that marketers can pull to grow their share of search
Of course, even share of search can be difficult to track and attribute in a reasonable time frame. The trends in the above case study played out over a period of years, making it more than a challenge to assess how any individual airing, creative, or campaign moved the needle.
But while a brand’s industry-wide share of search can be hard to measure and attribute in real time, there is one metric advertisers can quickly and easily track to see if their ads are moving their brand toward greater share of search and greater share of market. The answer? Ad-driven search engagement.
At EDO, we link every national linear TV ad and a massive set of streaming ads to the spikes in search engagement that advertisers see in the minutes after the airing.
If a brand’s engagement increases above its baseline in response to the ad, it means the spot was effective in driving the search engagement that grows a brand’s share of search and, ultimately, its share of market. If an ad fails to increase a brand’s search engagement much, we know that it was unsuccessful in driving consumers from merely being aware of a product to actively considering a purchase.
With this information in hand, marketers can identify the creatives, messaging, networks, programs, and dayparts that are working best for them — and shift their budgets accordingly, all while the campaign is still in flight.
Let EDO help you understand what drives market share in your Convergent TV advertising
With search engagement data for every ad on national TV and a growing portion of streaming ads, EDO offers a full view into your brand's TV performance.
As a result, marketers can not only see how effectively their ads are generating search engagement— they can also see what is and isn’t working for their competitors.
To learn more about how EDO can help you optimize your Convergent TV advertising and win share from the competition, schedule a meeting with us today.